Banking, after all, isn’t the world’s favourite profession, and Charlie has a million and a half dollars in his safe back in the city. Of an afternoon by the pool, for instance: “Time stalled in a kind of endless looping eddy and all the pleasant sensations of this moment, the warmth and soft sounds and gentle motions, simply burbled on forever like some changeless screen-saver.”Įvery scene comes preloaded with ironies we can’t yet decode, depths we can’t quite measure. Lasdun captures the simple pleasurable lethargy of these pastimes in ways that remind us he is a poet as well as a novelist. In the end, though, despite their wealth, they only do what everyone else does on holiday: play tennis, swim in the pool, enjoy an assignation at a motel. The hills and woods, a kind of privilege in themselves, glitter around Charlie and his family as if seen through optical glass. There are plenty of empty conversations and some splendidly vicious parodies of food and drink jargon. The Fall Guy is good at depicting money and its way of life. When catastrophe comes, it’s not entirely what we expected What he sees there soon causes his sense of role play to wear off, “giving way to the less amusing knowledge that he was in fact spying on her” and everything begins to unravel. All this is maintained in a calm if creepy way, until, amusing himself one day “with a kind of play acting of husbandly suspicion”, Matthew follows Chloe to a local motel. At others – especially when he pads quietly around the master bedroom in their absence, chancing upon her knickers in the linen basket – he seems more like an orphaned adolescent. At times he seems like a cicisbeo, a tame secondary husband in what he thinks of as Chloe’s “realm of fantastical enchantment”. Matthew’s loyalty to Charlie and attachment to Chloe are a source of pleasant tension in his life. Although he has no designs on her, they share, he believes, a perfect understanding that extends from art to books to cooking. As for Chloe, what can you say? For Matthew it’s “never a neutral event” to see her. Matthew is perfect for that role, but James Lasdun’s third novel is billed as a thriller – albeit a psychological one – so Charlie, a banker who can throw a few tins of Osetra caviar into the shopping basket without a thought, has, as possible patsy, one major textual credential: he doesn’t seem like anyone’s victim. By page four you think it’s odd that Charlie’s so insistent, in his understated, manipulative way by page five you’re wondering which of them might be the fall guy of the title. In fact, before we know it, he has already agreed to get out of the car, catch a train back to New York and pick up a bracelet Charlie left behind. Matthew is more the junior partner, always offering, always giving, always biddable. Charlie, you sense, usually gets what he wants. S ummer, 2012: Charlie and his cousin Matthew set out one evening in Charlie’s Lexus to join Charlie’s wife, Chloe, at their summer home in the Catskills.